Cainta Catholic College

Cainta, Rizal

SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL DEPARTMENT

Academic Year 2020-2021
First Semester

UNIT 1 – CREATIVE WRITING: AN INTRODUCTION

Module 4: SENSORY IMAGES

INTENDED LEARNING OUTCOMES: At the end of the module, you should be able to:
1. Cull creative ideas from experiences
2. Master descriptive writing by using five senses.
3. Create an experience for the reader that evokes the senses.

I. WARM UP (PRELIMINARY ACTIVITY)

(Please see the attached DLAS to answer this activity)
DIRECTIONS: Go to an area where there is a concentration of sound (This could be as near as the
outside of your room or anywhere). Close your eyes and focus on what you hear. Using your journal,
describe what you hear. What is the noise like? too loud? Soft? Are there voices? high? low? Can
you describe the pitch? Do the sounds go together or not? How would you describe them altogether?
“A NECESSARY BLINDENSS”
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II. READING ACTIVITY:
(Please see the attached DLAS to answer this activity)

Here’s a great quote from a Huffington Post article talking about the 5 senses and sales. Write
the messages and the ideas that this article depicts.

“We experience life through our 5 senses. Life is full of sights, smells, touch, tastes, and sounds that we
unconsciously connect with emotion. If an experience touches multiple senses, the stronger the memory
that is created and the more likely we are to recall that which gave us the experience (positive or
negative).”
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III. LEARNING DISCUSSION:

THE SENSORY IMAGES

 Sensory comes from the Latin word sentire, meaning "to perceive, feel”.
 It describes something relating to sensation — something that you feel with your physical senses.
Sticking a knife into a toaster will give you a sensory experience, but so will smelling a rose
 Sensory imagery involves the use of descriptive language to create mental images. In literary terms,
sensory imagery is a type of imagery; the difference is that sensory imagery works by engaging a
reader’s five senses. Any description of sensory experience in writing can be considered sensory
imagery.
 As a literary device, imagery consists of descriptive language that can function as a way for the
reader to better imagine the world of the piece of literature and also add symbolism to the work.
Imagery draws on the five senses, namely the details of taste, touch, sight, smell, and sound

THE SENSORY IMAGES:

1. Sight - Visual imagery engages the sense of sight. This is what you can see, and includes visual
descriptions. Physical attributes including color, size, shape, lightness and darkness, shadows, and
shade are all part of visual imagery.

Example:
Outside, even through the shut window-pane, the world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies
of wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and though the sun was shining and the sky a
harsh blue, there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered
everywhere. The black mustachioed face gazed down from every commanding corner. There was
one on the house-front immediately opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption
said, while the dark eyes looked deep into Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn
at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word
INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the roofs, hovered for an instant
like a bluebottle, and darted away again with a curving flight. (1984 by George Orwell)

2. Smell - Olfactory imagery engages the sense of smell. Scent is one of the most direct triggers of
memory and emotion, but can be difficult to write about. Since taste and smell are so closely linked,
you’ll sometimes find the same words (such as “sweet”) used to describe both. Simile is common in
olfactory imagery, because it allows writers to compare a particular scent to common smells like
dirt, grass, manure, or roses.
 Example:
In the period of which we speak, there reigned in the cities a stench barely conceivable to us
modern men and women. The streets stank of manure, the courtyards of urine, the stairwells stank
of moldering wood and rat droppings, the kitchens of spoiled cabbage and mutton fat; the unaired
parlors stank of stale dust, the bedrooms of greasy sheets, damp featherbeds, and the pungently
sweet aroma of chamber pots. The stench of sulfur rose from the chimneys, the stench of caustic
lyes from the tanneries, and from the slaughterhouses came the stench of congealed blood. People
stank of sweat and unwashed clothes; from their mouths came the stench of rotting teeth, from their
bellies that of onions, and from their bodies, if they were no longer very young, came the stench of
rancid cheese and sour milk and tumorous disease. (Perfume: The Story of a Murderer by Patrick
Suskind)

3. Taste - Gustatory imagery engages the sense of taste. This is what you can taste, and includes
flavors. This can include the five basic tastes—sweet, salty, bitter, sour, and umami—as well as the
textures and sensations tied to the act of eating.

Example:
On rainy afternoons, embroidering with a group of friends on the begonia porch, she would lose the
thread of the conversation and a tear of nostalgia would salt her palate when she saw the strips of
damp earth and the piles of mud that the earthworms had pushed up in the garden. Those secret
tastes, defeated in the past by oranges and rhubarb, broke out into an irrepressible urge when she
began to weep. She went back to eating earth. The first time she did it almost out of curiosity, sure
that the bad taste would be the best cure for the temptation. And, in fact, she could not bear the
earth in her mouth. But she persevered, overcome by the growing anxiety, and little by little she
was getting back her ancestral appetite, the taste of primary minerals, the unbridled satisfaction of
what was the original food. (One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez)

4. Touch - Tactile imagery engages the sense of touch. This is what you can feel, and includes
textures and the many sensations a human being experiences when touching something. Differences
in temperature is also a part of tactile imagery.

Example:
My instep arch not only keeps the ache, It keeps the pressure of a ladder-round. I feel the ladder
sway as the boughs bend. And I keep hearing from the cellar bin The rumbling sound of load on
load of apples coming in. For I have had too much of apple-picking: I am overtired of the great
harvest I myself desired. There were ten thousand fruit to touch, Cherish in hand, lift down, and not
let fall.
"After Apple Picking“ Robert Frost

5. Hearing - Auditory imagery engages the sense of hearing. This is the way things sound. Literary
devices such as onomatopoeia and alliteration can help create sounds in writing.

Example:
Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its
steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand
years ago (Herman Melville's Moby Dick)
IV. PRACTICE
(Please see the attached DLAS to answer this activity)
DIRECTIONS: Examine the following examples in the literature and identify the sensory image
used.
1. The Yellow Wallpaper, Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1892). “The color is repellant, almost revolting; a
smouldering, unclean yellow, strangely faded by the slow-turning sunlight. It is a dull yet lurid orange in
some places, a sickly sulphur tint in others.” The descriptions of color here are visual imagery. “Faded,”
“dull,” and “lurid” are all adjectives we associate with color. Meanwhile, “smouldering,” “unclean,” and
“sickly” are unusual descriptors, since they’re typically associated with people, not colors. By using a
combination of commonplace and unusual language to describe color, Perkins Gilman both invites us to
imagine the actual color of the wallpaper and imbues it with emotional weight, transforming this room
into a symbol of the character’s emotional frustration and oppression.

2. Moby Dick, Herman Mellville (1851). “The vast swells of the omnipotent sea; the surging, hollow roar
they made, as they rolled along the eight gunwales, like gigantic bowls in a boundless bowling-green;
the brief suspended agony of the boat, as it would tip for an instant on the knife-like edge of the sharper
waves, that almost seemed threatening to cut it in two; the sudden profound dip into the watery glens
and hollows; the keen spurrings and goadings to gain the top of the opposite hill; the headlong, sled-like
slide down its other side;—all these, with the cries of the headsmen and harpooneers, and the
shuddering gasps of the oarsmen, with the wondrous sight of the ivory Pequod bearing down upon her
boats with outstretched sails, like a wild hen after her screaming brood;—all this was thrilling.” This
passage uses kinesthetic imagery—surging, rolled, tip, dip, slide, shuddering—to give the feeling of
motion on a boat. Sound is also important to this passage: we can imagine the scream of chickens, the
gasps of the oarsmen, and the hollow roar of the ocean.
3. The Awakening, Kate Chopin (1899). “There were strange, rare odors abroad—a tangle of the sea
smell and of weeds and damp, new-plowed earth, mingled with the heavy perfume of a field of white
blossoms somewhere near.” Chopin compares the smell of the sea to smells that we associate with the
earth (weeds, soil, flowers) throughout The Awakening, both adding a layer of complexity to her
imagery (beyond the usual salty, briny, fishy smells associated with the ocean) and positioning the sea
as part of the earth. This foreshadows the pull this character will feel toward the sea.
4. The Awakening, Kate Chopin (1899). “There were strange, rare odors abroad—a tangle of the sea
smell and of weeds and damp, new-plowed earth, mingled with the heavy perfume of a field of white
blossoms somewhere near.” Chopin compares the smell of the sea to smells that we associate with the
earth (weeds, soil, flowers) throughout The Awakening, both adding a layer of complexity to her
imagery (beyond the usual salty, briny, fishy smells associated with the ocean) and positioning the sea
as part of the earth. This foreshadows the pull this character will feel toward the sea.
5. Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë (1847). “I heard the rain still beating continuously on the staircase
window, and the wind howling in the grove behind the hall; I grew by degrees cold as a stone, and then
my courage sank. My habitual mood of humiliation, self-doubt, forlorn depression, fell damp on the
embers of my decaying ire.” Descriptions of temperature and moisture are tactile imagery. In this case,
the rain and Jane’s physical discomfort mirror her dark mood.
V. ACTIVITY
(Please see the attached DLAS to answer this activity)

Look at the image below, in 4-5 paragraphs write your description using your five senses. What sounds are
present? What is the smell of the surrounding? What is the texture of the land? What does the person taste?
What is the overall mood or emotion captured by your descriptions?

REFERENCE/S:
Vasquez, LMV., Lee, G., Creative Writing. Manila City: REX Book Store. 2017